The India Fix: What Gurgaon namaz attacks, Modi’s Kashi puja tell us about the Hindu rashtra project

 The India Fix

A newsletter on Indian politics from Scroll.in.

Shoaib Daniyal

Dec 20, 2021 · 09:00 am

YouTube/PMO India

In 1958, while inaugurating the construction of the Bhakra Nangal Dam, India’s first prime minister, Jawharlal Nehru proceeded to call dams the “temples of modern India”.

As it turns out, he was wrong: temples are the temples of modern India.

Take a look at the “millenium city” of Gurgaon. It developed as an industrial township, hosting first automobile factories and then new-age services such as software. However, the past few weeks have seen groups of Hindutva workers disrupting the congregational prayers carried out by Muslims every Friday.

Visuals from the site show the numbers of these extremists are small – but their hold over the administration is so powerful then eventually, they forced the state government to acquiesce to their demands. On December 11, the chief minister himself announced that his government was withdrawing the sites designated for namaz.

Two standards

People who want to stop the Gurgaon namaz cite a strict form of laïcité in support of their argument: since the Haryana government has identified public land as temporary namaz spots, this goes against secularism. Even if we ignore Muslim complaints that they are not allowed to build new mosques in Gurgaon, this is technically a valid variant of secularism: public resources should not be taken up for private worship.

However, anyone who thinks this rule uniformly applies to India would be in for a bit of jolt if she has switched on her television set on December 13, given the wall-to-wall, live coverage of Prime Minister Modi praying at the Vishwanath Temple in Benaras after inaugurating a new corridor that led to the river Ganga for the benefit of worshipers. Not only had the project been paid for by public funds, the inauguration event saw the line between Modi’s secular role as prime minister merge completely with his private faith as a Hindu. In political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s words he was “projected as a combination of Shankaracharya and Shivaji”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PM Narendra Modi visits KashiVishwanath Dham temple in Varanasi.(PTI photo)

An ethno-religious state

Rather than laïcité, therefore, what the juxtaposition of Gurgaon and Benaras then represents is more data on the evolving state of India’s “Hindu rashtra”. As political scientist Vinay Sitapati has argued, it is useful to remember that rather than a project far off in the future, the Sangh Parivar’s idea of a Hindu state is already here. This is quite obvious given the high pitched coverage of Modi as a priest-prime minister inaugurating the temple corridor in Benaras and before that the Ram Temple in Ayodhya at the site of the Babri Masjid.

So what does a Hindu rashtra mean? Unlike Islamists, Hindu nationalists have very few historical models to fall back upon when trying to build a state. So this is very much a play-it-by-ear project. It is also – contrary to the lazy overuse of the word “medieval” – a very modern project, built upon 19th- and 20th-century ideas of popular nationalism.

The first concrete feature of Hindu rashtra has been to reduce Muslim representation in politics. Asking for Muslim votes is now decried as “vote bank” politics – even though community-wise voting is common in India and is a critical tool used to bargain for state benefits as part of India’s system of patronage politics. The current Lok Sabha has less than 5% Muslim MPs with, critically, none in the Bharatiya Janata Party. As a result, India’s 200 millions Muslims have very little voice in the country’s federal government.

The second big feature of the Hindu rashtra is the invisibilisation of Muslims from public space. So while Hindu religious ceremonies can and do take place in public commons (and sometimes even with public funds), militant Hindutva workers can quite easily prevent Muslims in Gurgaon from doing the same. In the same vein, politicians can, without resistance, take part in Hindu religion ceremonies but Muslim ceremonies – as seen in the earlier practice of iftar parties – would now be coded as “appeasement”. India’s model of secularism, where the state attempted a balancing act to reach out to all communities, is now practically dead.

Another Friday, another Hindu right wing attack against Muslims praying in Gurgaon, India. They are threatening them not to offer Namaz but to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’! pic.twitter.com/bV7f6aJ9WY

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) December 17, 2021

 

‘Democratic’ support

Note that while much of this is illiberal, the Hindu rashtra we see in 2021 is very much a mass project – but built upon defining India in ethnically Hindu terms. In that sense, while the Hindu rashtra might not be a liberal democracy, it is in the narrow sense of the term still a democracy with governments being voted into office. This is hardly surprising. If Hindus – nearly 80% of India – are successfully defined as a singular political community, then this produces a sort of “permanent majority”. Till this bloc holds, Hindutva has not much to fear from elections. On the contrary, elections are a major source of support given two back-to-back massive wins in 2014 and 2019 with the aid of Modi’s charisma.

In fact, this extends to even parts of the democratic structure beyond elections. The judiciary was often imagined as a check on populism, especially the religious variety. The awarding of vast and unique powers to the judiciary – India’s Supreme Court is often seen as the world’s most powerful – was often justified with the argument that, cut off from popular pressures, judges would stop politicians from undermining the Indian Constitution. Of course, the very opposite has happened when it comes to secularism. As political scientist Suhas Palshikar writes, with the Ayodhya judgment in 2019, the courts “judicially inaugurated the Hindu state”.

A similar positioning can be seen among large parts of the media, especially national Hindi and English-language television channels, which have taken to broadcasting programming which border on blood libel. In November, for example, a leading channel broadcast an entire show with the fantastic and bizarre claim that Muslims were running an organised campaign to spit in food. So absurd was the premise that Newslaundry reported that the channel had to take down the show down from YouTube. But of course by then it had already aired on national television.

India is not unique in trying to set up what political scientists call an ethnic democracy. Israel is the world’s most famous example, which both awards voting rights to its non-Jewish citizens but simultaneously keeps them permanently out of power. Closer home, Sri Lanka is also an ethnocentric country with an exceptionally violent past after the rise of Sinhala nationalism in the 1950s.

A rocky road to full success

However, India does offer some unique elements compared to other ethnocentric countries. Opinion polling results released in June by the Pew Research Centre saw a majority of people conflate the act of being Hindu and “truly” India. But simultaneously an overwhelming majority (including 85% of all Hindus) agreed with the fact that respecting all religions was a core Indian value. In that sense, India’s ethnocentrism is a work in progress.

The other is, of course, India’s sheer size. India has 200 million Muslims – a population bigger than all but six countries in the world. As the Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019-2020 showed, this sheer size by itself can bring along significant political weight, in spite of the ideology of the federal government.

As a result of India’s sheer size, the BJP’s strength – and consequently the influence of Hindutva – can vary quite a bit from state to state. State identities in places like Bengal and Tamil Nadu can often work at cross purposes to Hindutva, much as language undercut Muslim nationalism during the short duration of united Pakistan from 1947 to 1971. So while Indian Muslims have no voice in the federal government, they are a strong support base of the current government in West Bengal.

In many ways, this federal angle is key to understand why say even the BJP has to manoeuvre hard when it comes to its ideology of Hindutva. While Narendra Modi and his charisma have seen great success with this for two Lok Sabha elections, this by itself is not a guarantee of hegemonic power, as we saw with the rollback of the farm laws or, in fact, with the election defeat in the 2021 West Bengal elections.

Hindutva is also handicapped by its one-point agenda: as journalist Aakar Patel puts it Hindutva “is purely about the exclusion and persecution of India’s minorities, particularly Muslims”. Given that the BJP excludes Muslims from its voter base, it has to depend on electoral backing from Hindus across caste lines – a new and still fairly unstable phenomenon in Indian politics. The BJP will require this anti-Muslim, Hindu caste coalition to hold for a substantial amount of time in order to fully ethnicise Indian democracy.

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Source: scrollin

శ్రీ కౌముది డిసెంబర్ 2021

 

Shillong’s Dalit Sikhs were vital to its growth – but are being written out of its story

 North East Politics

The Meghalaya government has taken possession of Punjabi Line, home to the community since the 19th century.

Ipsita Chakravarty

Makepeace Sitlhou,

Punjabi Line is a densely packed strip of land on the edge of Bara Bazaar, the commercial hub of Shillong. On October 30, the Meghalaya government took possession of this land and handed it over to the urban affairs department.

Several ideas have been floated about what to do with the 2.5 acres – maybe build a flyover or a parking complex, the deputy chief minister mentioned “beautification”. The verdict was that the strip of prime real estate could not be occupied by squalid homes. Especially if many of those homes belonged to “illegal settlers”, as a government-appointed committee claimed.

The takeover had been enabled by a tripartite agreement signed last month by the Meghalaya government, the Shillong Municipal Board and the Syiem of Mylliem, the head of the tribal body that controls land ownership in Shillong.

The actual residents of Punjabi Line, often referred to as Sweepers’ Colony, were not consulted. Most are Dalit Sikhs, or Mazhabis, a community that has traditionally worked as sweepers in Shillong. The government has extended the offer of talks to them only now, after having taken over Punjabi Line. As they face forced relocation, the local Harijan Panchayat Committee has vowed to fight back.

It will not be easy. Many stories of marginalisation intersect in those 2.5 acres. Maligned as “outsiders”, they have been the target of hostilities from communities considered indigenous to Meghalaya. As Dalits, they have faced exclusion within Shillong’s Sikh community. They may have been intrinsic to Shillong’s growth as a city, but now the Mazhabis of Punjabi Line could be displaced by new patterns of urbanisation in the same city.

Colonial city

The residents of Punjabi Line claim the land was gifted to them by the Syiem of Mylliem in the mid-19th century, around the time the village of Yeodo became Shillong, a colonial town central to British interests in the region.

In 1874, the province of Assam was carved out of Bengal. Shillong became the political and administrative headquarters of the new province. Over the next few decades, it would also be fashioned into one of the many “hill stations” that served as summer retreats for Europeans in India. The burgeoning township needed, among other things, adequate sanitation and a waste management system if it was to keep the title of “Scotland of the East”.

While the British got Bengalis to man the administration, Mazhabis were brought in from Punjab to clean the city, sweeping the main thoroughfares, ferrying out the night soil. By the late 1910s, they were on the rolls of the newly formed municipal corporation, writes historian Himadri Banerjee. They were settled around the Bara Bazaar area, then a sparsely populated part of town. Over the years, wives and families joined the original group of workers settled in Shillong. As their numbers swelled, some were accommodated in Gora Line.

Their Dalit identity meant they were ghettoised in these localities, even if they spread into jobs outside the municipality. “In spite of the rapid expansion of Shillong, they were strictly advised to reside within their restricted areas,” writes Banerjee. So Dalit Sikh settlements remained two small pockets of the city, surrounded by other ethnicities. Poverty and population pressures meant these were congested, poorly heated, poorly sanitised places.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shillong. Picture credit: Windrider24584 at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8474130

In the shadows

The squalor of these localities, the grim work that their residents had to do, struck a discordant note in the idyllic urban spaces they were supposed to preserve. Banerjee notes how colonial officials stuck behind processions carrying night soil out of the city complained about being exposed to the “uncivilised” demeanour of the municipal workers.

The city’s higher caste Sikhs also echoed these ideas, abusing Mazhabis for their “dirty and unclean style of living”, excluding them from sacred spaces and community groups, continuing practices of untouchability.

These prejudices, of Mazhabis sullying the city with their living habits and their anti-social behaviour, have also surfaced in more recent articles written in local papers. Take this piece from 2018, where the author complains of the “filth” of Them Mawlong, the Khasi name for Punjabi Line. While he acknowledges the practices of untouchability and rebukes the Syiem for not spending money on improving local infrastructure, the author also complains about the “brigands” of Them Mawlong who allegedly lurk in the shadows to harass passers-by, especially women. If chased, they will disappear into homes “built like rodent holes”, the author claims. He also laments that the Mazhabis have erased the Khasi name, Them Mawlong, and christened the area “Punjabi Colony”.

The article was published shortly after Khasi groups – triggered by social media rumours – closed in on Punjabi Line and clashed with security forces as they tried to break into the Sikh colony. Members of Khasi civil society groups claimed the clashes could not have been communal – why else would Sikhs in other parts of the city be spared?

These claims do not acknowledge the way faultlines of caste and community have converged in the marginalisation of Mazhabis in Shillong.

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The (final) Political Fix: Why you cannot understand Indian politics without examining the media

 Plus, an announcement.

Rohan Venkataramakrishnan 

Nov 1

The Big Story: Pressing charges

This is the final edition of the Political Fix.

Don’t worry, you will still be able to get your weekly dose of analysis on Indian politics and policy and more from next week. We’re just making some changes, which we’ve announced at the bottom of this newsletter.

For today’s edition, we decided to turn the lens inward on the media industry, given that understanding Indian politics also requires understanding Indian journalism. The Indian media world has undergone tremendous changes over the last decade, and many of the trends that have taken root directly impact the way the country’s politics, and indeed, democracy functions:

    The right-wing lurch continues
    Starting in 2013, a big churn began in Indian newsrooms, as proprietors replaced top editorial leadership with names more acceptable to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Faced with the first majority government in four decades, and one that cares deeply about headline management, the news media by and large fell in line.
    The most telling of moves came when a news channel was founded by a Member of Parliament who is now a BJP minister, and whose head, Arnab Goswami, does not even make a pretence of being anything but an attack dog for the government. And the coverage has been so partisan that, across the media industry particularly in North India, the tone of reporting on Muslims is now drawing justified comparisons to the infamous hate speech propagated by Radio Rwanda.

    But that doesn’t mean we are getting insight
    The paradox here is that, despite a widespread lurch to the right across the mainstream media, actual insight into the workings of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or even the broader Hindutva ecosystem, is limited. At the political level, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah prefer to keep their cards close and spring surprises, which is why the BJP was able to replace practically the entire government in Gujarat earlier this year, with no hint in the national press that this was coming.
    That is not to say there aren’t journalists in the mainstream who have insight into politics. Some are able to point to the complex machinations at play or the underlying trends. But because Indian political journalism almost entirely depends on access, they have little choice but to toe the official line if they want to get interviews – or more importantly be in a position for their organisations to bring a big political name to conclaves and summits, which are major money-makers for media companies. This isn’t limited to Delhi. The trends repeat themselves in smaller fashion in state capitals across the country.

    Exceptions exist – but they face danger
    Those who are willing to question the consensus are at risk of severe retribution from the authorities. For example, an editor at a Gujarati news portal who hinted at the rumblings within the state government in 2020 was charged with sedition and had to spend two weeks in jail. Dainik Bhaskar, the Hindi newspaper group that surprisingly set out to hold the government accountable during India’s devastating Covid-19 second wave, faced income tax raids soon after.
    And we don’t need to recount the FIRs, arrests, raids, mob aggression and more targeted at news organisations and journalists for simply reporting facts. After all, in the middle of the first wave, ministers took time aside to sit in meetings in which they discussed how to ‘neutralise’ independent media…

    The reader revenue era is here
    Indian readers never really paid for news in print. Thanks in part to the aggressive and often ethically questionable practices of the industry leading Times Group, Indian print journalism over time came to rely almost entirely on advertising for revenue. The actual price of a newspaper barely covered the cost of the ink and distribution, never mind the journalism printed on it. Such a tremendous reliance on advertising, much of it from governments, meant that news organisations were also susceptible to arm-twisting.
    As Indian news consumers moved online, organisations were reluctant to ask them to pay – knowing the audience was not accustomed to it, and could easily jump ship. But over the past few years, paywalls have begun popping up across mainstream news websites and subscription-only products have started to build audiences. That doesn’t mean the model has been cracked or the switch to reader revenue has taken root. But it does raise the question: What might it mean for an industry to move away from the corporate and government advertising that has sustained revenues for so long?
    More on this below.  

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శ్రీ కౌముది నవంబర్ 2021